attempts to disguise themselves as *choke* authors!
http://www.courant.com/hc-spamoetry0819.artaug19,0,7995457,full.story
August 20, 2007
Dallying With The Muse Of Spam
Disguised As Verse, It Fools The Filters
By JANICE PODSADA | Courant Staff Writer
August 19, 2007
Charmagne Tripp thought her computer was being inundated by an anonymous -
and prolific - poet.
She opened several e-mails that, even though they were topped with
advertisements, contained line after line of what appeared to be poetry.
That didn't seem particularly unusual to Tripp, 34, who hosts weekly poetry
readings at Vibz Uptown, a Hartford restaurant and nightclub. She often
receives e-mail from budding writers.
But looking closer, she realized that it "wasn't poetry at all, or if it
was, it was written by somebody who couldn't express themselves," Tripp
said.
It was spam.
Andy Werner, on the other hand, owner of The Language Link of Connecticut,
immediately recognized a similar batch of gibberish-filled e-mail for
exactly what it was.
"It's different than the raw porn coming in five years ago, but it's still a
nuisance," said Werner, 45, whose Newington-based company provides
professional translation services.
What's going on here? The same people who have bombarded us for years with
spam punctuated with four-letter words are now filling our inboxes with
poetry?
Spammers seem to be cutting the raunch and opting for a lyrical approach.
Words like #%$! and %&{circ}# have been replaced by snippets of poetry,
literature and random lines of text. The idea: Confuse your spam filter.
An ad for Viagra, ($1.78/100 mg; Cialis $3/20 mg) contained these lines:
"Wide, whited fields, a way unframed at last that rings, with faithful
tongue, its pious note, by bloody pool -rattling, gasping his last. Blurring
the terrain, A pallid yellow lingers to listen, by the sputtering, smoking
fire."
Nice huh? It's actually an amalgam of phrases taken from Charles Baudelaire
and Paul Verlaine, two 19th-century French poets.
Lest you think this is the work of a muddled but literate spammer, the truth
is: However evocative, the passages aren't meant to uplift or inspire, but
to defeat your spam-blocking software.
The same tired ads for cut-rate software, off-shore pharmacies and organic
love potions now contain 10 to 20 lines of text. The accompanying text,
which has been dubbed spamoetry, can sometimes resemble free verse.
"Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!" Monty Python intoned in a 1970 skit (and
hence provided the alleged origin of the term for unwanted e-mail). And now,
poetic spam.
Spamoetry is the latest weapon being deployed by spammers, said Doug Bowers,
senior director of anti-abuse engineering with Symantec Corp., the
Cupertino, Calif.-based developer of Norton AntiVirus software and other
programs.
Every time programmers come up with a way to block the latest generation of
spam, spammers seem to come up with an equally clever way to thwart them.
Designed to fool blocking programs into thinking they're seeing a legitimate
e-mail, spamoetry is created by software programs that randomly pull text
from all over the Internet.
In spite of spamoetry's insidious purpose, some people find it hard to
resist.
The musings of the machine have drawn the attention of artists, ordinary
folks and bloggers who revel in posting what they consider to be
particularly inane or profound examples on websites and blogs devoted to
spamoetry.
In the new world order, one person's spam is another person's art.
"Not that I am a huge fan of poetry or anything, but the beautiful and deep
work being produced by the random-text generators employed by spammers has
truly moved me," someone posted at www.ifisgeek.com/2007/02/23/spamoetry.
"Who needs poets any more? With the beautiful works coming out of spambots
these days, what need do we have for real poets any more?" another admirer
posted at www.digg.com/offbeat_news/spamoetry.
It may be amusing, but it's costing us.
Two-thirds of all e-mail is spam. Every day, four out of five adults receive
a piece of spam, experts estimate. And a 2004 study estimated that spam is
costing businesses $22 billion annually in lost productivity, according to
the National Technology Readiness Survey.
"It's time lost by workers reading no-value e-mail," Bowers said.
Besides crowding employees' inboxes, spam clogs a company's mail server and
takes up valuable computer storage space, Bowers said.
Programs that generate spamoetry, Bowers said, grab content from everywhere
on the Internet - from technical news groups to websites that feature
selections from the Bible, Shakespeare and the "great books," which accounts
for such pairings as, "Empty streets I come upon by chance, snowdrops and
crocuses might be fooled III. Chronology of Northern Exploration."
To guard against an influx of spam, companies typically employ a type of
spam blocker known as a Bayesian filter, which analyzes whether or not a
given piece of e-mail is spam, said David Gianetti, a New Haven based
e-commerce analyst.
"The filter assigns weightings to words, and comes up with a score,"
Gianetti said. "Based on that score, it uses probability to determine
whether an e-mail is spam."
To fool the filter, spammers insert random words and phrases into their mass
mailings. The addition of text - spamoetry - throws the filter off.
"If an e-mail contains 10 words that appear in spam and 300 commonly used
words, then this stuff gets through," Gianetti said.
When Susan Batson Feuer, a Canadian artist, noticed the appearance of the
new type of spam, she initially thought it was badly translated e-mails from
overseas.
"Some of them were hilarious, moving, intriguing, bizarre," she said. "I
started keeping them."
A year later, Feuer, the owner of St2dione Creative, a design company, has
created a line of clothing and accessories called Matchstick Atom Sp@mwear
that incorporates spamoetry into its design.
Feuer has gleaned such phrases as "Chipmunk Hopelessness," "Indigestion
continuum anxiety" and "Assume Flotation!" from spam, and imprinted them on
T-shirts and backpacks.
"Now that technology and machines bring so much form to our lives," Feuer
said, laughing, "it seems fitting that they should have a say."
Antivirus and anti-spam companies are busy trying to develop filters that
can recognize spamoetry, Gianetti said: "The problem is, it gets more and
more tricky to discern the good e-mail from the bad."
But a few people hope that spam never goes away.
"This blog is dedicated to nonsensical, yet entertaining spam. Here's hoping
those spammers continue to remain a step ahead of spam filters with their
computer-generated mastery of the English language," a blogger posted at
thisproductwillchangeyourlife.blogspot.com.
Spamoetry's fans are willing to put up with the irritating ads and
overflowing inboxes.
"The top part's not so great - the ads for Viagra and Cialis," said Brendan
Mahoney, 23, a recent graduate of the University of Connecticut. "But the
poetry part, I like. I like the randomness. It's better than magnet poetry.
It's rendered out of the flotsam and jetsam of the Internet."
"If this kind of spam were to go away, I would miss it," Feuer said. "But
I'd be OK. I have a collection of 1,500 of them in my inbox."
"Beyond ice floe and berg and ice-bound sea. Merely a mockery of spring ...
the old men burnish stories of Yaz and the Babe."
Sigh. That's beautiful.
Contact Janice Podsada at jpodsada@courant.com.
--
-So, now you know why you may be getting jibberish emails.
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